A New Fairness-Oriented Packet Scheduling Scheme with Reduced Channel Feedback for OFDMA Packet Radio Systems

In this paper, we propose a flexible and fairness-oriented packet scheduling approach for 3GPP UTRAN long term evolution (LTE) type packet radio systems, building on the ordinary proportional fair (PF) scheduling principle and channel quality indicator (CQI) feedback. Special emphasis is also put on practical feedback reporting mechanisms, including the effects of mobile measurement and estimation errors, reporting delays, and CQI quantization and compression. The performance of the overall scheduling and feedback reporting process is investigated in details, in terms of cell throughput, coverage and resource allocation fairness, by using extensive quasi-static cellular system simulations in practical OFDMA system environment with frequency reuse of 1. The performance simulations show that by using the proposed modified PF approach, significant coverage improvements in the order of 50% can be obtained at the expense of only 10-15% throughput loss, for all reduced feedback reporting schemes. This reflects highly improved fairness in the radio resource management (RRM) compared to other existing schedulers, without essentially compromising the cell capacity. Furthermore, we demonstrate the improved functionality increase in radio resource management for UEʹs utilizing multi-antenna diversity receivers.